> >i am only curious as to how killall(1) fits with othe OS's that have
> >`killall' commands.... what are they and what do they do?
>
> On FreeBSD and various Gnu/Linux distributions, killall kills all
> running processes whose names match the one specified.
> On Digital UNIX, however, killall is similar to kill -1, killing
> all processes started by the user, except the calling one.
> Other systems might produce similar results although I think the
> first variant (kindof a symbolic kill) is the most useful one.

I run IRIX (and NetBSD;) and in IRIX killall sends a signal to a set of
processes specified by name, process group or process ID. (I thinks this is
a great thing and would love to see it in NetBSD!)

When called by a superuser without specifying anything it terminates all 
processes
that are not not in the same process group as the caller. (This behavior is a 
little
bit dangerous, don't you think?)

/Chris